Harumichi Shibasaki was nearly 70 when he began making YouTube art tutorials from his quiet home in the Japanese countryside. Five years on, he has 1.4 million subscribers.
Unlike the attention-grabbing antics of most top YouTubers, the grandfather has won hearts with his calm, soothing manner, which fans say makes them feel “warm and peaceful.”
He has also built a global following thanks to the English subtitles on his videos demonstrating painting and sketch techniques, which sometimes feature his grandchildren and two cats.
Photo: AFP
“Hello. Shibasaki here. How’s everyone doing?” the gray-haired art instructor with glasses and a mustache says in Japanese, pausing to smile and wave.
The 74-year-old films everything himself for his channel “Watercolor by Shibasaki” using tripods, lighting and a smartphone or DSLR camera.
He is also active on Instagram, TikTok and Twitter, and said that being directly connected to the world is “like a dream.”
Photo: AFP
“We didn’t even have a TV at home when I was a child,” Shibasaki said near his home in a rural part of Chiba, outside Tokyo, where birdsong fills the air. “As someone from my generation, I didn’t expect there would ever be a time like this.”
His videos range from how to paint cherry blossoms to snapshots of daily life, such as cooking bamboo shoots dug up from his garden.
Like many successful YouTubers, his clips are peppered with banner and video ads, while big fans can send cash during livestreams or pay to access members-only footage.
It was Shibasaki’s son who first encouraged him to post on the site — a chance for the instructor with decades of experience to reach a global audience.
“I like teaching, I like chatting with everyone. I can talk for five, six hours,” Shibasaki said.
During the darkest days of the COVID-19 pandemic, Shibasaki’s subscriber count soared.
In one April 2020 video he showed viewers how to sketch a smudgy, fluffy cat, saying he hoped drawing together would help them feel better while stuck at home.
A flood of comments in different languages called the video “calm and relaxing” and said that Shibasaki’s “kind” voice had left a “warm and peaceful” impression.
“Viewers say I have a really good voice, but I have no idea why,” he said, laughing.
People tell him that his slow, relaxed delivery reassures them, and some even see Shibasaki — who has undergone heart surgery six times — as an agony uncle.
Because of his health scares, “death has become a concrete mental image,” he said, meaning he can “truly understand” the problems people share with him.
Shibasaki loved painting from a young age, but as the only son of a farming family in Chiba, he expected his parents to ask him to take over their land.
However, overcome with the desire to move to Tokyo and study art at the age of 18, he rushed to ask his parents’ permission while they were hard at work.
“They looked back at me in the rice field and said I should go. I’m so grateful for that,” he said.
Shibasaki later became an art teacher and strived to make his advice easy to understand, just like in his videos.
“Painting is fun,” he said. “It’s a battle with myself to achieve perfection. It’s interesting, and there’s a sense of achievement.”
Shibasaki wants to continue painting as long as possible.
When artists get older, “their eyesight gets worse, their hands shake,” he said. “I’m going to turn 75, so I’ll only be able to draw properly for another five years or so, but in the meantime, if I can make paintings to leave behind, that’s what I want to do.”
An endangered baby pygmy hippopotamus that shot to social media stardom in Thailand has become a lucrative source of income for her home zoo, quadrupling its ticket sales, the institution said Thursday. Moo Deng, whose name in Thai means “bouncy pork,” has drawn tens of thousands of visitors to Khao Kheow Open Zoo this month. The two-month-old pygmy hippo went viral on TikTok and Instagram for her cheeky antics, inspiring merchandise, memes and even craft tutorials on how to make crocheted or cake-based Moo Dengs at home. A zoo spokesperson said that ticket sales from the start of September to Wednesday reached almost
‘BARBAROUS ACTS’: The captain of the fishing vessel said that people in checkered clothes beat them with iron bars and that he fell unconscious for about an hour Ten Vietnamese fishers were violently robbed in the South China Sea, state media reported yesterday, with an official saying the attackers came from Chinese-flagged vessels. The men were reportedly beaten with iron bars and robbed of thousands of dollars of fish and equipment on Sunday off the Paracel Islands (Xisha Islands, 西沙群島), which Taiwan claims, as do Vietnam, China, Brunei, Malaysia and the Philippines. Vietnamese media did not identify the nationalities of the attackers, but Phung Ba Vuong, an official in central Quang Ngai province, told reporters: “They were Chinese, [the boats had] Chinese flags.” Four of the 10-man Vietnamese crew were rushed
Scientists yesterday announced a milestone in neurobiological research with the mapping of the entire brain of an adult fruit fly, a feat that might provide insight into the brains of other organisms and even people. The research detailed more than 50 million connections between more than 139,000 neurons — brain nerve cells — in the insect, a species whose scientific name is Drosophila melanogaster and is often used in neurobiological studies. The research sought to decipher how brains are wired and the signals underlying healthy brain functions. It could also pave the way for mapping the brains of other species. “You might
INSTABILITY: If Hezbollah do not respond to Israel’s killing of their leader then it must be assumed that they simply can not, an Middle Eastern analyst said Israel’s killing of Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah leaves the group under huge pressure to deliver a resounding response to silence suspicions that the once seemingly invincible movement is a spent force, analysts said. Widely seen as the most powerful man in Lebanon before his death on Friday, Nasrallah was the face of Hezbollah and Israel’s arch-nemesis for more than 30 years. His group had gained an aura of invincibility for its part in forcing Israel to withdraw troops from southern Lebanon in 2000, waging a devastating 33-day-long war in 2006 against Israel and opening a “support front” in solidarity with Gaza since
RSS